Extending controlled tabular adjustment for non-additive tabular data with negative protection levels

Abstract

Minimum distance controlled tabular adjustment (CTA) is a recent perturbative methodology for the protection of tabular data. An implementation of CTA was recently used by Eurostat for the protection of European Union level structural business and animal production statistics. The realworld instances to be solved forced the classical CTA model to be extended with two features: first, to deal with non-additive tables; second, and most important, to consider negative protection levels. The latter extension means a significant modification of the classical CTA mixed integer linear model. We present and compare new models for these extensions. Computational results are reported using a set of real-world instances, and two state-of-the-art commercial solvers (CPLEX and Xpress).